Patricio Pron - My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

I dreamed that there was a crazy writer named Clara. A psychiatrist at her side supported her refusal to authorize an interview with a team of documentary filmmakers, and he said the word humiliation over and over again until she got up and put a white metal plate on her chair, saying that she was the plate. Then, using her fingernails, she wrote a physics formula on the cement floor and she left. In the following days she stopped eating. My theory was that the writer had wanted to express a desire, to ask for food, and she had done it the only way she knew how: as if we, wanting to eat watermelon, had asked for sugar and water. But the rest of the spectators thought that the physics formula — contrasting the sizes of the earth and the sun — could never be a request but was instead a revelation the writer was making to us before she died from starvation and firm resolve.

I dreamed that I was watching a film with my father. Some shoes, I think they were mine, lay on the floor between us and the television, which was showing a commercial made up of children’s drawings of flying machines. A screen of handwritten text followed the commercial: We are all part of our language; when one of us dies, so does our name and a small but significant part of our native tongue. For this reason, because I don’t want to impoverish the language, I have decided to live until the new words arrive. The signature at the end was illegible and only the three dates that followed it could be made out: 1977, 2008 and 2010. My father turned to me and said: 2010 is 2008 minus 1977, and 1977 is 2010 backward. You have nothing to fear. I replied: I’m not afraid, and my father turned his gaze back to the television screen and said: But I am.

My mother’s face was drawn together in a serious expression when I woke up, and she came over to me as if through the vibrant air of a summer day. Outside it was raining — it had started as I was returning from the museum the day before — and my mother’s face seemed to sum up the absurd situation we were in: her husband and her son were sick and nobody knew what to do. As I always did when I was sick, I asked for my sister. She’s at the hospital now, answered my mother, but she spent all day yesterday by your side. My mother put a damp cloth on my forehead. You went to the museum to see your father, she asked; she didn’t wait for my reply. I figured, she said, and she turned her face away, which had already started to dampen with tears.

Outside the rain kept falling, and as it fell it seemed to swallow up the air, pushing it behind the solid curtain of water the rain formed between the sky and the earth, to a place where my lungs couldn’t reach and neither could my parents’ or my sister’s. Although the air was filled with water, it also seemed empty, as if it hadn’t really been replaced by water but rather by some intermediary substance, a substance of sadness and desperation and all the things you hope to never have to face, like the death of your parents, and yet are there the whole time, in a childish landscape of constant rain that you can’t take your eyes off.

Is it morning or afternoon, I asked my brother when he appeared with a cup of tea. Afternoon, said my brother. Do you mean that it’s after noon or truly the afternoon, I asked, but my brother had already left by the time I was able to articulate the question.

Is it morning or afternoon, I asked again. This time my brother was bringing me a bowl of soup that he’d made. It’s night, he said, pointing outside. He told me that our mother and sister were at the hospital with our father and that they were going to spend the night there. So you’re babysitting me, I said to him, trying to sound sarcastic. My brother answered: Let’s watch TV, and he dragged over a small wheeled table with the television set on it.

I liked being there, with my brother. The fever had started to lift, but I still had problems focusing my vision for long periods and I had to look away when my brother started flipping through the local channels in search of a movie for us to watch. At one point he stopped on a show about policemen chasing criminals in a shantytown on the outskirts of the capital; the sound wasn’t particularly good — it was recorded in the worst circumstances, in the midst of shoot-outs and wind and weather — and the local dialect seemed to have changed a lot since I’d left, so I didn’t understand anything they were saying. The program had subtitles only when poor people were speaking, even though what the police said was incomprehensible too, and I thought for a moment about what kind of country this was in which the poor had to be subtitled, as if they were speaking a foreign language.

Finally my brother stopped on a channel where a movie was just starting. The premise was that a young man had suffered a minor accident and spent a few days in the hospital; on returning home, for some reason, he believed that his father was to blame for the accident and started to follow him, always keeping his distance. His father’s behavior showed no signs of being dangerous, but, in the son’s imagination, everything the father did was linked to a specific murder the son believed he was going to commit. If the father went into a store and tried on a jacket, the son thought he was planning to wear it as a disguise, since he never wore jackets like that. If his father flipped through a travel magazine in the barbershop, the son thought he was looking for a place to run off to after the murder. Because the son loved his father and didn’t want him to end up in jail — and because he believed that he was the intended victim — he started to set traps to try to sabotage his father. He hid the jacket, burned his father’s passport in the sink and destroyed his suitcases with a knife. For the father, these baffling domestic mishaps — his new jacket had disappeared, as had his passport; the suitcases he had in the house were torn — were surprising but also irritating. His usually jovial nature grew more and more bitter each day, and something inexplicable, something hard to justify but at the same time as real as an unexpected cloudburst, made him suspect that he was being followed. On his way to work, he obsessively searched the faces of his fellow passengers on the metro, and when he was out walking, he looked over his shoulder at every corner. He never saw his son, but his son saw him and attributed his nervousness and irritability to anxiety provoked by his imminent crime. One day the father told the son about his suspicion and the son tried to mollify him. Don’t worry, it’s just your imagination, he said, but the father was still jumpy. That same afternoon, tailing his father as he did every day, the son saw him buying a gun. When he got home that night, the father showed the weapon to his wife and son and they argued. The wife, who had doubted her husband’s stability for some time, tried to snatch the gun away from him; there was a struggle that the son watched, speechless, until he let out a scream and forced himself between them. The gun went off and the mother fell down dead. Looking at her, the son realized that his intuition was both right and wrong: he had foreseen the crime but failed to see that he wouldn’t be the victim, that he and not his father would commit the crime, that his father was nothing more than the instrument of someone else’s runaway imagination. This all resulted from an accumulation of real events, profoundly real but misinterpreted. As the movie ended, I discovered that my brother had fallen asleep next to me and I didn’t want to wake him. The flickering light from the yogurt and car commercials continued projecting onto my face for quite some time.